> Alas it just means that running on the web the target so going to be primarily in-memory for a long time because the web spec folk seem so uninterested in doing a good actual filesystems impl. Origin Private File System seems to be the one place there's interest in being fast at all, and they seem overwhelmingly concerned about making sqlite in emscripted fast & not a ton else. What we would do for real wasi on the web!

Despite the constraints of the browser sandbox and the performance penalties, when you consider all the environments where people have actually used coreutils to great effect, it's undeniable that people were getting real work done in the 90s and early 2000s on strictly worse systems; if you tried to simulate many of those experiences entirely in-browser today, then you still wind up at an advantage (even with modest hardware, like, say, a 5-year old Chromebook) compared to what people were actually getting by with at the time.

The biggest stopping force is really the premature fatalism that follows from the comparison to programs that run with the system linker/loader, have unmitigated access on the host, and the freedom ("pleasure"?) of running memory-unsafe code, or so on. I'll further stipulate that programs that are written in such a way that they require any one of these things are fundamentally broken (at least for most values of x).